There are 3 ways to drive managed service performance; regardless of your niche.  

From working with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) over the years, I believe that there are 3 items they should be able to do (with relative ease) to see where they can start driving further profitability out of their MSP practice.

The idea for the exercise is to focus on costs, customer satisfaction and your incident ratios.  Individually, you may find that these items are reporting “OK” numbers. However, doing this exercise may prove otherwise.  Especially when we consider the overall picture and not individual touch points within your organization (a common mistake for many MSPs).  In fact, it may provide you with an opportunity to adapt and make some changes before things really start causing friction within your organization.  

This friction will undoubtedly make it to your customers and the end result oftentimes is one that produces a negative customer experience.  If you’ve been following us, this is something we have stressed in a previous post and why it is important to consider your customer’s experience with your organization.  

3 Ways to Drive Managed Service Performance

1. Create a baseline for your costs
2. Identify trends that have negative impact
3. Measure Customer Satisfaction

Not quite sure how to measure the above?  No worries. Got you covered…

1. Identify the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).  

   • In this step, access the any reports related to your ticket counts or service requests over the same period of time you calculated the TCO for your Service Team.  Hopefully, you have an application or process in place that allows you to track the amount of time spent on requests… If not, please, please get one. History is littered with enough MSPs that did not see the value of tracking time.  

2. Identifying Trends

   • This step may not be so easy to accomplish; however, once done, you will be able to better validate the data and identify trends by reviewing your Customer Satisfaction Scores.  When reviewing your TCO, look for areas where you are spending more time on items than you probably should. This could provide you with opportunities to automate repetitive tasks that could be driving costs up consistently.

   • Also, consider looking for potential clients that may be repeatedly reporting issues.  Is this a training issue on the client side? Or an issue with their environment that needs to be addressed?   Either which way, there is something going on that is driving your costs up – address it.

3. Review the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Scores related to your Service Team

   • Review the CSAT Scores of your Service Team.  You should have a process in place that helps identify the Service Team member, the type of item they were working on and client information at least.  Review the scores as a team and an individual team member basis to identify any trends that may be impacting your customer experience. Oftentimes within your surveys that you SHOULD be sending out to clients there is a plethora of information that you can leverage to improve performance.  

Once you’ve taken the steps above, you should have a better idea of where you can drive Managed Service Performance for your company.  With effective Strategic Planning your company can be well on it’s way to not only optimizing performance internally, but creating a surreal experience for your clients that they will never forget and always appreciate!  

Let’s talk about how you identify trends, enhance customer experiences and optimize your service team

For those MSPs that feel as if they are looking for ways to further Drive Managed Service Performance or are actively looking for an organization to partner with that will help scale operations, feel free to contact Neon Blue; for 60 minutes, we do not mind having conversations about where you are, where you want to be and what you can do to get there.  Scaling without the risk has never been so easy.

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